MSI will soon be rolling out a new mini ITX motherboard, a model called J1800I that makes use of Military Class 4 components for ' record-breaking stability' and comes equipped with a Bay Trail-D processor, more specifically, the 2.4 GHz dual-core Celeron J1800. The chip has a maximum TDP of 10 W so MSI added only an aluminum heatsink for cooling.

The J1800I also features two DDR3-1333 SO-DIMM slots (for up to 8 GB of memory), two SATA 3.0 Gbps ports, one PCIe x1 slot, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel audio, one USB 3.0 port, and D-Sub, DVI and HDMI output. The board is available for pre-order for 74.15 Euro.

looks nice board but why not pciex 16? and so dimm? i prefer standard ram and why they put caps on that

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You need to consider the target market. Bay Trail is Atom, Intel's tablet/netbook processor. The chip only includes 3 PCIe lanes, and no one is going to use external graphics with such a low power processor.

As far as the reason for SO-DIMM, this board is only going to be used in small form factor applications. Regular DIMMs would stick up beyond the CPU heatsink, limiting where you can put the board.

You're right; it probably would fit, as long as you used standard DIMMs. Now I'm guessing that this is an issue with memory traces; by using SO-DIMMs in the locations they are, MSI may be able to use a PCB with fewer layers and reduce production costs.

You need to consider the target market. Bay Trail is Atom, Intel's tablet/netbook processor. The chip only includes 3 PCIe lanes, and no one is going to use external graphics with such a low power processor.

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They still could at least leave the backside of the slot open, so that you can install a PCIe 4x or higher in it, as Bay Trail is still fast enough to run a home server, and a PCIe 8x card with 8x SAS/SATA, like the IBM ServeRAID M1015, can be had for $150, and would make fore a cheap low end server.

Celeron J1800 is Silvermont Atom, and that is ... classic Atom or sb/ib/hw derivative? Which one? It's Atom w/ooo, I think.

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It is Silvermont and it is the same core as in the newest Atom processors, but to call it "classic Atom" is a bit disparaging. It's a completely new OoO architecture designed for the low power space, the first new low power architecture from Intel since 2008. This processor is meant to compete with AMD's Kabini.